Plan and prepare for Power Automate in 2022 release wave 1

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new in Power Automate?. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Important

The 2022 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2022 to September 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Power Automate.

Overview

Microsoft Power Automate provides the tools you can use to improve your business' productivity by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Power Automate provides a better way to get things done across your organization through cloud robotic process automation (RPA). It is deeply integrated with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and the rest of Microsoft Power Platform.

Power Automate is investing in several areas as a part of Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 1, including the following four themes:

  • Automation for everyone – exactly where you need it: Today, the way that many people discover Power Automate is through our integrations in other products, like Windows 11, SharePoint, or Microsoft Teams. This wave, we're making it easier to get started with automation no matter what application you're using in Windows or Microsoft 365.

  • Hyperscale Cloud RPA: From our biggest enterprise customers to our small and medium businesses, everyone is increasing the scale of their RPA deployments. We'll make it easier to roll out RPA at scale - with features to make it easier to manage your machines in Azure and the credentials of your users and accounts.

  • Automation that lets you sleep at night: We're taking the burden of complexity and repetitive work away from you. That means, fundamentally, the service must never go down, we should deliver you consumer-quality end-to-end experiences, and ultimately, everything about our platform needs to "just work." All the features we have must be reliable and consumable, and automatable by default (adhering to the API-first approach), so that you can set it and forget it.

  • Anyone can get started: We'll make it easier for anyone to get started with automation when they launch Power Automate for desktop or go to PowerAutomate.com for the first time. In addition to relevant first-run experiences, we'll be adding more intelligence throughout the product, making it easier to process even complex documents.

For official product documentation and training for Power Automate, go to:

RSS Subscription Updates to Power Automate 2022 release wave 1

Tip

Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.

* Overview guide available in English version only

Investment areas

Investment areas

Process advisor
Process advisor quickly captures detailed steps for each process in your organization to help you better understand the opportunities to streamline your workflows. Process advisor includes both task mining and process mining capabilities.

Desktop flows
The need for accessing robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities becomes more and more urgent for organizations. Indeed, they are looking to help their employees be more productive by focusing on the most important tasks and avoid spending time on repetitive, time-consuming ones, which often can be automated. Building desktop automation can be complex hence it is critical to provide simple and intuitive user experiences for people who build or run automation flows. Desktop flow makers can either be advanced RPA developers or citizen developers with less technical skills but they both need to be able to build the automations they need. In this democratization journey, Power Automate for desktop comes now with Windows 11 making RPA easily accessible for both individual users as well as organizations.

In 2022 release wave 1, we'll keep investing heavily in Power Automate for desktop to make automation even easier with improvements like welcoming in-app tutorials and out of the box ready-to-run desktop flow examples. Additionally, we'll expand the Power Automate for desktop capabilities by addressing the main UI challenges like image-based automations. All those application enhancements come with platform improvements providing better governance, monitoring, and troubleshooting capabilities to help organizations with the deployment and management of their desktop automations.

Cloud flows
Cloud flows is a core automation capability in Power Automate that allows customers to focus on what matters and automate the rest. This product area includes:

  • Integration with applications like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dynamics 365 suite of applications, and more.
  • Integration with the rest of Microsoft Power Platform, including the ability to invoke workflows from an app created using Power Apps, when a data alert is triggered in Power BI or to take an action in Power Virtual Agents.
  • Mobile applications that help customers be notified, perform approvals, invoke, and monitor automation execution on the go.

This functionality was first released in 2016 and has been updated on a weekly basis. In 2022 release wave 1, we're focusing on making it easier to build, deploy, and share automation as well as help organizations drive adoption with confidence through deeper governance and privacy controls.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Power Automate below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Power Automate

Get the most out of Power Automate

Helpful links Description
Release plan View all capabilities included in the release.
Product updates Stay up to date on latest product updates.
Release calendar Know important release milestones.
Licensing Improve your understanding of how to license Power Automate.
Product documentation Find documentation for Power Automate.
User community Engage with Power Automate experts and peers in the community.
Upcoming events Find and register for in-person and online events.
Product trials Get started with Power Automate.